Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 474 posts

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#111

Post by yayachiken »

phatfish wrote: post #98
yayachiken wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. The outage in spain had multiple complex causes. While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused gene…

Yup, its interesting that a community supposedly of "engineers" are happy to claim expert knowledge of domains in which they have no experience.

That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.

While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#112

Post by giantg2 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #84
giantg2 wrote: post #77

While it could be good to shift to renewable for other reasons, it's naive to assume that nations won't be dependent on others for critical minerals and metals needed to make solar/wind/batteries/etc.

They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course). If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again. If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future,…

Yes, the shocks aren't as immediate if you have the infrastructure set up and you are out of the initial adoption phase. Even things like lithium and silver are limited resources, so getting more out of the ground will eventually face scarcity as energy demand has always increased over the long term.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#113

Post by morkalork »

hiddencost wrote: post #46
lm28469 wrote: post #31

The US about to discover you can't just blindly follow fanatics in religious wars without any consequences.

I mean given that our secretary of defense has a Deus Vult tattoo... and this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran... I think we might be the fanatics starting a religious war.

Also a gigantic Jerusalem cross tattoo.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#114

Post by weinzierl »

ryukafalz wrote: post #44

As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least. It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything. The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in plac…

"As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least."

It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.

Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#116

Post by shevy-java »

ryukafalz wrote: post #44

As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least. It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything. The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in plac…

> It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.

A few get rich. Project2025 (that is, their hardwing agenda is the cover up for theft).

We need to monitor these guys and then take back what they took from all of us globally.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#117

Post by tialaramex »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #12
noobermin wrote: post #4

Like 1 year ago, wallstreet bros were being interviewed saying they decided all the green pledges and all that was woke from the pre-trump 2 era, and I haven't heard anything at all about climate change really from any world leader in the last few years. I guess once again, people have their coming to jesus moment when it's far too late.

Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change. America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.

> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.

In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.

You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#118

Post by standeven »

anovikov wrote: post #110
ryukafalz wrote: post #44

As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least. It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything. The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in plac…

But why does US need any of that? It's a massive exporter of fossil fuels and will be much richer as a result (but yes just as every other way of getting richer, it will also increase inequality).

Burning fossil fuels also raises the global temperature, reduces air quality, and people still have to pay more at the pump.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#119

Post by nradov »

cpursley wrote: post #56
lm28469 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.

The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could…

The Israeli missile defense systems have worked amazingly well considering the scale of the threat.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#120

Post by Cthulhu_ »

giantg2 wrote: post #90
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #2

Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts. The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situat…

This might make sense on a larger timeframe but stating that your grid isn't stable enough to support AC demand while also pushing for electric car adoption seems counter intuitive. It would likely take years to improve the grid to support accelerating electric vehicle demands.

Years and tens if not hundreds of billions; the Netherlands is experiencing this, after a decade of cheap solar, a rise in EV, and new builds being built fully electric on the consumer side, and many datacenters and green energy generators built on the business side, our grid is at capacity to the point where new businesses can't get connected and new housing projects are put on hold (I think); the grid can't manage any more. The grid manager Tennet spent 15 billion last year, and will need to keep doing that for at least another decade - and that's a relatively small country.
Post reply on HN